You Don’t Need To Be Busy To Be Productive

Busy and productive are not synonyms. When you realize this, you start prioritizing your work. You could be working all day and get nothing productive done while you can be busy for an hour and achieve more.

Productivity is also a state of mind; a calm mind will help you achieve more than a stressed mind. As important it is to keep working, it is also important to pause and think about what is necessary at that moment.

Is working continuously with a tired brain important than switching tasks? Is working on one thing till it is completed more sensible than doing it in chunks? Is rushing from task-to-task smart work, or is taking a minute to organize your sense of purpose and then going about your day smart? Smart work trumps hard work, always!

It all boils down to what you are working on and how. Most people skip the first step of doing anything, which is, research and planning. Before beginning any task that has many subtasks to it, planning is essential. Reasons for skipping this are, it being boring and sometimes even intimidating to some.

When you have all the facts laid out with multiple ways to do the said task, you can make an informed decision on how you would like to proceed. This has a significant correlation with whether you are just busy or you are actually productive.

Take this example for instance; you are given a task to shoot a short film for the first time. You know how to operate a camera, you have made mini clips before.

Now, let’s say you skip the research and planning because how different can it be than shooting videos. You have an idea and go about shooting various scenes. You have to shoot a scene on a railway platform. It takes you 5 hours to get the shot because you are at the location at peak hours making it impossible to find a place empty enough and silent enough to shoot. You have been busy for 5 hours but how productive have you been?

On the other hand, you research the peak hours, check the train schedule, note down the slow hours and the time in between two trains, then plan your shoot accordingly. Let’s say you spent one hour on research, which is much more than you would need to be honest, and then you get the shot in 5 minutes because you arrived at the time when there are fewer people and less noise. You weren’t busy for an insane amount of time, you got the same work done as the first case, you were productive without the frustration of spending hours on a work that could have been done in minutes.

Continuous failure on a task can hinder with your productivity. In moments like these, you have to stop and ask yourself what could be done differently. Skipping main steps like research and planning, to save time and jump into action directly, can have the opposite effect most of the times.

I used to be one of those; didn’t want to waste my time on research when I could instead be working. But with experience, you learn how naive that thought is. Preparation never hurt anyone. Being busy and having no time for myself was in fact affecting my work quality. So, I switched to always putting pen to paper to see in what all ways I could do a task and then took the best route.

Our goal isn’t to be working 24×7 with not much to show for it. Our main aim is to get things done, so, before you begin any task, give it at least a minute in your brain, think of a more efficient way to do it. A stressed, frustrated, tired brain can still work with a lot of push, but the work is not going to be desirable which will get you stuck into a numbing cycle. Set your mind to be productive than busy and see the changes for yourself!